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Aug 26, 2006

"Defending my enemy's enemy," my attempt at a nuanced discussion of the recent Israel-Lebanon war, has been aired on several blogs and listservs and has gotten a wide range of comments, pro and con. These responses have challenged me to look at several gaps and weaknesses in the original argument as well as places where I just didn't convey my meaning clearly. I offer these follow-up notes in the spirit of continuing discussion and learning. They're organized around three sets of questions.

1. Given that Hezbollah has been the main force defending the Lebanese people against recent Israeli attacks, is it insensitive and out of touch to criticize Hezbollah's politics now? Does this criticism feed passivity and inaction by reinforcing the common view that neither Israel nor Hezbollah deserves our support?

"Defending my enemy's enemy" argues clearly that U.S. activists have a pressing responsibility to defend Hezbollah and the Lebanese people against Israeli aggression, the vastly greater threat. The essay was intended to counter two oversimplifications -- first, the idea that the war was a simple conflict between Good Guys and Bad Guys and, second, the idea that we should denounce Israel and Hezbollah equally. I regret that the essay doesn't present this second point as clearly and forcefully as the first, but it is there. Treating both sides as equally culpable certainly does lead to passivity, which in practice means passively supporting U.S./Israeli aggression.

At the same time, I don't think it's good organizing strategy to paint Hezbollah only in positive terms. Precisely because criticisms of Hezbollah are already widespread, we need to take a clear stand against the U.S. and Israel as the main aggressors while also addressing Hezbollah's political flaws accurately and without demonization. If we want to mobilize protest and resistance, that's a lot less out of touch than telling people their concerns about Hezbollah are either wrong or unimportant.

I hope it's clear that this is not about trying to "dictate" Hezbollah's politics. None of us is in a position to dictate anything to Hezbollah. It's about trying to understand an important political actor and relate to it in an informed and principled way.

2. Given that three-way fight politics is largely rooted in U.S./Canadian/European antifascist activism, is it a helpful framework for understanding Hezbollah or other examples of political Islam in the Middle East?

The idea that there are significant right-wing forces radically opposed to both the left and global capitalist elites doesn't just come from encounters with neonazis. If the concept of right-wing anti-imperialism has relevance anywhere, it's in the Middle East. The Iranian Revolution was a wake-up call for me because it showed how militant, mass-based hostility to U.S. hegemony could take a right-wing form -- and because so much of the U.S. left failed to understand this. Three-way fight politics is an attempt to go beyond old leftist categories because the old categories don't adequately describe political reality today -- including political Islam.

That said, there's plenty of room for applying new categories badly, too. "Defending my enemy's enemy" is pretty vague on exactly how the concept of a "revolutionary right" relates to Islamic political movements, so several caveats are in order. First, as Max argues on his blog Ideas for Action, political Islam has to be analyzed in the context of Mideast history and politics, not shoe-horned into a North American or Euro-fascist mold. Second, political Islam includes many different kinds of movements, organizations, and ideologies, which relate to the United States, global capital, local elites, etc. in a variety of ways. If "revolutionary" in this context means actively working to overthrow the established political framework, then only some Islamic rightist groups can be labeled revolutionary (and Hezbollah isn't one of them).

Third, like any theoretical model, three-way fight politics is at best a useful approximation of reality. Saying that there are three major political poles doesn't mean all forces can be divided neatly into three camps. We need to be mindful of movements -- such as Hezbollah -- that don't relate to the three poles in a simple or static way. And we need to be willing to rethink our assumptions and categories where they don't make sense.

3. Is it accurate to describe Hezbollah as right wing?

Several people -- including folks sympathetic to my overall argument -- have questioned my description of Hezbollah as right wing. While I still think the label is accurate, the situation is more complex -- and possibly more fluid -- than what I presented before.

There are good reasons to be skeptical about the rightist label. Michael Karadjis, an Australian leftist who has long followed Hezbollah's development and has spent time in Lebanon, argues that it's a big mistake to equate the party's policies with Khomeini-style fundamentalism. In the areas it controls, Karadjis reports, Hezbollah doesn't enforce religious law, doesn't impose special strictures on women but rather allows them to be visible and active, doesn't persecute other ethnic or religious groups, and works with leftists rather than execute them (although Karadjis also cites one scholar's claim that Hezbollah did kill a number of communists during its formative period, in 1984-85).

Several other points bolster this view. Since its first official declaration in 1985, Hezbollah has consistently said that an Islamic state can't be imposed by force, but can be instituted only when a large majority of the people wants it. Hezbollah has promoted dialogue between Lebanon's diverse religious communities and opposes the archaic system that apportions the country's political offices based on religious affiliation. Unlike some Sunni fundamentalist groups, Hezbollah argues that the secularization of society is a much lesser injustice than Israeli occupation.

After interviewing Hezbollah women activists in the 1990s, Maria Holt wrote: "In the view of the women of Hizballah, women are accorded a strong role in society. They are permitted to acquire education, to work, to become leaders, and to have a political input. At the same time, however, a woman must not attempt to usurp the position of men in the society." In Hizballah, "women are still excluded from the centers of power and accorded a status secondary to that of men." (Holt, pp. 187, 189) This assessment is consistent with many right-wing religious movements, as I've discussed elsewhere ("Notes on Women and Right-Wing Movements"), but it's probably fair to say that it's relatively progressive given the larger context. And there's evidence that women's status in Hezbollah has been improving -- in 2005, Hezbollah appointed the first woman to its political council, or politburo, which coordinates the party's committees.

All of this sharply delineates Hezbollah from the cultural totalitarianism of Afghanistan's Taliban or Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front, which has murdered women for not wearing the veil. You can make a good case that those groups represent a new form of clerical fascism, but there's no way Hezbollah can be labeled fascist. Although its militant resistance to Israeli and western intervention has brought it a reputation for extremism, Hezbollah's stance on a range of important issues is strikingly moderate.

But this is not the whole picture. First, although it accepts political pluralism in practice, Hezbollah still advocates an Islamic state, i.e. a theocracy, a policy it considers a religious duty. This state would look a lot like Iran's, which Hezbollah considers the closest thing to a perfect political system anywhere in the world. Naim Qassem, Hezbollah's deputy secretary-general, comments that Iran has "manifested success through its attention to freedoms, respect for opinions divergence, women's rights and the management of state institutions" (Qassem, p. 236). Sounds like the old CP talking about Stalin's Soviet Union.

Hezbollah's ideological bond with Iran's Islamic Republic is far deeper than, say, its alliance with Syria. Hezbollah-controlled areas are plastered with images of Iran's religious/political leaders. In several recent antiwar demonstrations in Europe, according to Workers Left Unity Iran, Hezbollah supporters have clashed with Iranian leftists who raised the slogan "No to imperialist wars; No to Iran's Islamic regime."

Second, Hezbollah is formally subordinate to Iran's supreme authority (originally Ayatollah Khomeini, now his successor, Ayatollah Khamenei), who the party regards as the religious, legal, and political leader of all Muslims worldwide. This doesn't mean that Hezbollah is a puppet of the Iranian government -- it actually exercises a great deal of political autonomy. It does mean that Hezbollah's leaders seek Khamenei's guidance or ruling on major policy questions or when they are deadlocked. Accounts vary as to how often this happens; Amal Saad-Ghorayeb cites Hezbollah's decision to participate in Lebanon's parliamentary elections as one example.

A third reason to call Hezbollah a right-wing organization is that its pragmatic pluralism doesn't apply to everyone. On his Sketchy Thoughts blog, Kersplebedeb cites the case of a Lebanese gay man, Nasser Karouni, who sought asylum in the United States. Karouni argued that Hezbollah, which controlled the region where his family lived, considered homosexual sex a capital offense and had persecuted or killed gay friends and acquaintances of his. I would treat this report with a bit of caution: the source article lacks details or any specific dates after 1984, when Hezbollah was still taking shape, and this is the only reference I've found anywhere to Hezbollah's policy regarding homosexuality. (Queer sex could presumably bring the death penalty in Hezbollah's ideal Islamic state, if Iran's penal code is any guide.)

And then there's Jews. In her detailed explication of Hezbollah's political/religious philosophy, Amal Saad-Ghorayeb shows that Nasrulluh, Qassem, and other Hezbollah spokespeople have repeatedly demonized Jews as evil, deceitful, cowardly, violent, and power-hungry. This bigotry is distinct from Hezbollah's charge that Zionism is inherently oppressive (a position I share), although it infuses references to Zionism as "the most dangerous and malicious enemy of humanity" and the like (Saad-Ghorayeb, 142). Several Hezbollah spokespeople, including Nasrulluh, have also claimed that Jews either fabricated or helped to perpetrate the Nazi genocide.

I have to pause here and note that charges of antisemitism are routinely used to demonize Muslims and Arabs and to rationalize Israeli (and U.S.) racism, whose impact on Arab peoples has been vastly more devastating than Arab violence against Israelis. As I wrote before, Hezbollah does not exist to kill Jews and is not continuing Hitler's work. It resists Israeli oppression but also -- because of its underlying right-wing philosophy -- promotes anti-Jewish stereotyping and bigotry. Not more and not less.

How do we put all of this together? Saad-Ghorayeb argues that Hezbollah has pursued a dual strategy, balancing its version of Islamic ideals on the intellectual level with a largely secular programme on the level of practical politics -- a combination she suggests is unstable in the long run. Using different terms, we could say that Hezbollah offers a contradictory mix of radical theocracy and populist nationalism.

Hezbollah's highly skilled leadership has navigated this tension, in part, through strategic shifts. The most dramatic of these took place after the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990, when Hezbollah moved from revolutionary opposition to the Lebanese political system to a policy of trying to transform it from within. This shift was probably influenced (but not determined) by the rise of a more moderate faction in the Iranian government. Given the explosive nature of Middle East politics, it's quite likely that Hezbollah will go through further changes in the years ahead.

The interview shows both courage and dedication on the parts of the R.A.S.H. militants, and stands as a concrete example of independent, autonomous, and libertarian solidarity.

From interview introduction:"7 Lebanese youth working with the R.A.S.H., the antifascist Red Anarchist Skinhead collective in Europe decided to return to Lebanon to help with relief work as the death toll in their country mounted. Within a few days they were risking their lives walking through southern Lebanon with 80lbs of food and water on their backs to arrive at villages near the Israeli border that humanitarian organizations had deemed unreachable. With Israeli missiles falling all around them, they supplied food to starving people unable to evacuate their villages.

21 year old Hassam is a part of the group who on their own in spontaneous acts of mutual aid continued to provide aid in the most dangerous regions of Lebanon."

In the interview Hasam states aspects that motivated their collective’s effort,

“There were people who weren’t able to leave (the southern villages). And those were the people with the most need… We choose to do this on a volunteer basis to show the people who we were helping that we are not expecting from them anything, were doing this really to help. It’s not like if we are doing this for political conditions like it’s happening in Beirut…we wanted people to see that there was still hope… there are people who are accepting to take risks, accepting to sacrifice their life…”

“It’s about standing up and doing something. Everyone can do something… people in the USA can do something, they can make a stand…to show that they wont support Israel or send military stuff… all our lives we are having jobs we hate to buy stuff we don’t need, there’s people dying everyday there are tragedies all around the world…”

Aug 9, 2006

I’m in general agreement with this piece and I also largely agreed with your earlier criticism of the common left perception that the Bush Administration is fascism in development. [This refers to a separate essay that hasn't been published yet.]

When pushed, both Workers World and the Spartacists will reduce the so called ‘war on terror’ to a surrogate for some other ruling class strategy - a more aggressive pursuit of imperialist interests and/or the imposition of ‘fascism from above’ in the imperialist center. To the contrary, I think that there is a growing consensus within the ruling class that global capitalism is seriously threatened from the right – a threat that is painted as fascist with increasing frequency. I think that this is not only public relations and propaganda, it is how the ruling class ideologues see the world. Further, I think that the feeble mass response in North America and Europe to greatly expanded opportunities for solidarity and struggle is largely explained by the popular acceptance of major elements of this changing capitalist worldview. It is important to open up discussion in these areas.

The feeble organized metropolitan left is dominated by positions that don’t see Islamic radicalism as a serious and unique threat to the global capitalist system.These range from simplistic “war for oil” determinism to elaborate visions of an inter-imperialist challenge to U.S. global hegemony from new capitalist centers in China and India. Islamic radicalism is most commonly viewed as a some kind of “manufactured external threat”, as Professor Adel Safty, (ZNET 7/6) puts it. The basic problem with these positions is the obvious fact of a clear international ruling class consensus about the nature and magnitude of this particular threat. This consensus frequently overrides ruling class differences on the proper response to the threat, e.g., with respect to the war in Iraq. It also tends to overrides national and regional divergences in political and economic interests between blocs of capital and different ideological conceptions of the requirements for capitalist social equilibrium. I think that it is far more important to delineate this ruling class consensus, which includes important intellectual and governmental “dissidents”, such as Friedman and Barnett, not to mention the current governments of France, Spain etc., than it is to concentrate on alleged excesses and irrationalities in the Bush administration policy and posture.

I have some problems with your paper’s use of Worker’s World and Spartacist League positions. This is a serious debate and we should look for the strongest representatives of alternative positions. For Workers World, revolutionary analysis begins and ends with Lenin’s assertion that litmus test of a revolutionary is opposition to one’s own imperialism. The Sparts are what they always have been. Unless you want to debate Bordiga vs. Gramsci or Radek vs Bela Kun, its better to ignore them. I’d suggest Tariq Ali and Gilbert Achcar as serious and substantial advocates of the anti–Imperialist front politics of which Workers World is more a caricature. Less ideologically defined liberal/left positions criticizing a view of Islamic radicals as just “part of the movement” can be found on Juan Cole’s “Informed Comment” website, and, perhaps, more significant, on the “Baghdad Burning” website. These positions are substantive, not corrupt as, for example, Hitchens is, but they do lead towards a similar anti-fascist united front position that would include “reasonable” segments of the global capitalist ruling class. Both positions are clearly susceptible to reformist politics, but they are held by revolutionaries as well.

While writing this I’ve seen some postings about your piece that demonstrate the inexhaustible capacity of the left to repeat certain errors. Revolutionaries have to be willing to fight, but they also have to think. Some leftists can manage one, but not the other, at any given moment. Lots botch both. Our particular framework of analysis is not conducive to simple answers to the ‘What Is To Be Done’ question. This makes it doubly important that we fight against the difficulty becoming an excuse for passivity or inactivity. In this country, passivity amounts to support for the global ruling class.

However, there is a century of experience with struggles where the left suspended its critical and ethical faculties, supporting and participating in activity in conflict with its analyses, principles, and objectives. The results have been uniformly disastrous. To those who, without knowing who we are or what we do and have done, argue that our positions are illegitimate because they might ‘demoralize the movement’ and undermine the resistance to imperialism, I have to say that I’ve heard that before…a lot. I’ve accepted it more times than I like to remember. People I’ve worked with have spent lifetimes in jail – some have been killed – in large part because of this mindset. Others that I could name that have advanced the position are now professors, congressmen, pillars of the capitalist community and members of governments.

I intend to write in more detail about both the politics of global capitalism and the emergence of a neo-fascist challenge to that system, but I realize that it helps maintain some momentum in the discussion to respond fairly quickly, if briefly.

Aug 3, 2006

Question to the U.S. left and anti-war movement about the current war in Lebanon: If we want Israel to fail in its stated objective to destroy Hezbollah, does that mean we want Hezbollah to win?

The Israeli attacks on Lebanon are a mass atrocity, a calculated, long-planned campaign of terror that is inflicting vastly more suffering on civilians in Lebanon than Israelis are facing from Hezbollah missiles. Since 1978, Israel has invaded or occupied Lebanon repeatedly and has killed tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians. This is closely bound up with the long history of Israeli land theft, persecution, and mass violence against the Palestinian people, and the current Lebanon war is bound up with the latest Israeli violence in Gaza and the West Bank. In these attacks, the Israeli state has acted largely as U.S. imperialism's number one client and proxy, its actions interlinked with Washington's occupation of Iraq.

So let's be clear: We have a pressing responsibility to defend the Lebanese people, demand an immediate end to Israeli attacks, and expose the deadly U.S. role in the conflict.

But let's be clear about something else too: The fact that Israel and the United States want to destroy Hezbollah does not make it a positive political force. To be sure, Hezbollah has staunchly resisted Israeli aggression for years. It runs a sizeable network of social services and has a solid base of popular support centered in the largely poor Shi'i community but cutting across denominational lines. Yet no matter how courageous its fighters may be, no matter how many schools and hospitals it runs, Hezbollah is essentially a right-wing political movement. Its guiding ideology is Khomeini-style Islamic fundamentalism. Hezbollah's political ideal, the Islamic Republic of Iran, enforces medieval religious law, imposes brutal strictures on women and LGBT people, persecutes religious and ethnic minorities, and has executed tens of thousands of leftists and other political dissenters. This is not exactly a liberatory model.

In the framework of our basic opposition to the Israeli attacks, it's important for us to be open about our political criticisms of Hezbollah. That doesn't mean echoing the U.S. government/mass media line -- criticism doesn't mean demonization. Even if we accept that some Hezbollah armed actions have wrongly targeted civilians, it's transparent nonsense to say that Hezbollah is a group of "terrorists" and Israel is just trying to defend itself. It's quite possible that Hezbollah sometimes engages in anti-Jewish scapegoating, but the organization is not continuing Hitler's work and does not exist in order to kill Jews. Rather than try to impose Islamic rule on Lebanon by force, Hezbollah has repeatedly acknowledged the country's pluralistic character. And Hezbollah is not the root cause of the conflict with Israel. It is primarily a response -- a deeply flawed one -- to Israeli and western aggression in Lebanon and the Middle East, and to the oppression of the Shi'i community.

Among the statements on the Lebanon war I've seen so far from U.S. leftist and anti-war groups, most condemn the Israeli attacks against the Lebanese people but say little or nothing about Hezbollah's politics. Two notable exceptions are the Workers World Party and the Spartacist League, both in statements dated July 21, 2006. Workers World describes Hezbollah as the leader of a "national resistance movement" and argues that, for both Hezbollah and the Palestinian group Hamas, Islam "is the ideological form whose actual content is the struggle against imperialism." An article published in Workers World newspaper four days later describes Hezbollah as "a guerrilla resistance army with Islamic leadership" which "gained wide political legitimacy for its determined resistance and its well-organized, non-corrupt social services."

The Spartacist League takes Workers World to task for "prettifying" Hezbollah in this manner, and notes that during the Cold War both the United States and Israel "fostered the growth of Islamic reaction as a counterweight to Communism and secular nationalism." The Spartacists declare, "As Trotskyists, we in the Spartacist League militarily defend Hezbollah against the Israeli military machine in this conflict, while maintaining our political opposition to this reactionary fundamentalist outfit."

I know it's not popular to say nice things about the Sparts, but on this issue they take a good position and Workers World takes a bad one. To treat Hezbollah as anti-imperialist while glossing over its right-wing religious ideology is dishonest, simplistic, and short sighted from a propaganda standpoint, because it leaves you open to easy critique. The Spartacists' double-edged position -- we oppose Hezbollah's politics but defend them against Israeli attack -- respects people's intelligence more and offers U.S. activists a clearer and more principled way of relating to the conflict. It acknowledges the war's political complexity, instead of reducing it to Good Guys versus Bad Guys, but it also doesn't treat the two sides as equivalent or mirror images -- it takes a stand.

What's missing from the Spartacist League position, however, is a clear recognition that Hezbollah is both right wing and anti-imperialist. I don't mean Hezbollah is inconsistent -- I mean its opposition to Zionism and its U.S. patron is rooted in a right-wing philosophy. This doesn't fit conventional leftist categories, but it's not unique. Although the Islamic right was helped by the United States and Israel during the Cold War, today it includes some of the most militant and strategically important opponents of these same governments. (Hamas, the Taliban, and al Qaeda are other prominent examples, very distinct from each other and from Hezbollah.) We may not like this situation, but we need to find ways to understand it and deal with it.

The title of this essay refers to the book My Enemy's Enemy (Kersplebedeb, 2001), which warned that far-right politics were strong and growing within the anti-globalization movement -- and that many leftists were wittingly or unwittingly complicit in fostering this growth. My Enemy's Enemy helped crystallize the concept of a "three-way fight" to describe the global political situation. Instead of an essentially binary struggle between right and left, between the forces of oppression and the forces of liberation, three-way fight politics posits a more complex struggle centered on the global capitalist ruling class, the revolutionary left, and the revolutionary right. The latter encompasses various kinds of fascists and other far rightists who want to replace the dominance of global capital with a different kind of oppressive social order. This means there is no guarantee that militant challenges to global capitalism -- including popular anti-imperialist struggles -- will take a progressive or liberatory form.

Three-way fight politics is still a new and primitive analytic tool, but I think it's an important framework for discussion and a helpful corrective to oversimplifications that are common on the left. The Lebanon war highlights the concept's usefulness as well as the need to develop it further. Three-way fight politics has largely been used to draw a line between leftist and rightist versions of insurgent politics, to help leftists recognize the differences and warn them against dangerous alliances. Sometimes -- as with the anti-globalization movement -- that's exactly what's needed. But sometimes -- as with the Israeli attacks on Hezbollah and the people of Lebanon -- what we need to do is defend rightist forces, in specific ways and specific situations, against a greater political threat. My enemy's enemy is not necessarily my friend, but sometimes we need to defend people who are not our friends.

This approach to the Lebanon war raises many questions that I won't try to answer here. Within the basic outlines I've presented, what does critical defense of Hezbollah include and what does it exclude? What kinds of tactics and slogans best represent this position? Beyond the immediate situation, when does this kind of stance make sense, and when is it counterproductive? How, concretely, does it differ from solidarity with leftist forces? Given that right-wing anti-imperialist fighters are tying down U.S. imperialism and its allies in several countries, to what extent, if any, could this widen the space for liberatory movements? Such questions merit serious discussion, and that can only happen if we go beyond a simplistic Us-versus-Them model of politics. George Bush declared after September 11th: Either you are with us or against us. Surely we can do better than that.